Murder in Mexico (part one)

The lawless Mexican border town of Juarez is no stranger to death. Fiefdom of the infamous narco-trafficante 'Lord of the Skies', its fortunes are built on hard drugs and cheap labour. But now an even more ruthless menace stalks its dusty streets
Read part two here

Finally, the authorities gave Paula Gonzalez back the medallion of the Virgin of Guadeloupe which her daughter Maria Sagrario wore around her neck. It was terrible proof that Sagrario was dead. Paula held the medallion in her hands and implored the Madonna: 'Where were you when they did that to my little girl?'

Paula and her husband Jesus had last seen their 17-year-old daughter when she rose for work shortly before 4am on 16 April 1998, at their gimcrack home in Lomas de Poleo, a shanty of dwellings sprawled across high desert. Sagrario worked, like hundreds of thousands of other local girls, at one of the new factories, the US-owned maquiladores , in the burgeoning Mexican border city of Juarez. Normally, Sagrario would leave for the afternoon shift with her father and elder sister Guillermina, but the CapCom company had changed her routine. Instead, Sagrario now took the lonely mile-long walk down unlit dirt tracks to the main route through another shanty, Anapra, where she would wait for the company-chartered bus to take her and her fellow factory girls to work. After Sagrario failed to return that afternoon, Paula went to the police. 'Did she like to stay out late?' they asked. 'Did she wear mini skirts and go dancing?' Paula, disgusted, made 2,000 flysheets: 'Missing Teenager. Please Help'. Eventually, she learnt not from the authorities but a newspaper article that Sagrario's corpse had been dumped on the other side of town. During her abduction, Sagrario had been repeatedly raped and mutilated, just like the others.

There is a new word spoken in Ciudad Juarez: 'Feminocidio' - feminocide, the mass slaughter of women. There is no other word to describe what is happening: some 340 young women found murdered since 1992 in much the same manner as Sagrario, and a further 180 or so missing.

'They are dumped in public places, not even like animals, more like trash,' says Marisela Ortiz, from one of the groups campaigning to bring the killers to justice. The victims, she says, fit a pattern: 'They are poor, young, mainly migrants to the city looking to improve their lives in the factories. And when they are found, they have been tortured, mutilated, bruised, fractured or strangled and in every case violated - gang-raped.'

'The killers,' adds Marisela's colleague Rosario Acosta, 'take no trouble to cover up evidence, like most murders. With these, the evidence is brazen, right there, every time. Whoever is doing this knows they are immune from the law.' Diabolic games are played by the murderers. 'Sometimes, the police will show the parents a body,' says Dr Armine Arjona, who has tried to gather evidence herself, 'but the girl is dressed in the clothes of another.' One trick involved the police: the mother of one girl was, to her surprise, invited to the station to see if she could identify someone being sexually assaulted in a grainy video. She could - it was her daughter. 'When our search teams fail to find a body, one appears next day,' says Ortiz. 'There's some code: "Just letting you know we are here." Women are laid out in crosses, mutilated in a certain way; some signs we cannot decipher.'

The killing continues apace. On 23 September last year, two bodies were found: that of Erica Perez, with purse strings tied around her neck and pants around her knees. The authorities say she died 'of an overdose', but would not confirm results of toxicology analysis. Another, unidentified body, was found wearing clothes belonging to a different teenager whose body was found along with six others in 2001. On 22 November, yet another, dismembered and decomposing.

This year, the fiendish harvest continues. Esmeralda Juarez Alarcon shut down the market stall at which she worked on 8 January in order to catch her computer class. It was dusk, plenty of people to intervene, police officers to be seen around, including a special patrol. But Esmeralda vanished. Gabriel Alonzo, her boyfriend, still works at the stall opposite hers. 'I watched her as she left to walk to the school...'

And at the close of January, The Observer stumbled into further horror, and a more sinister twist: yet more bodies found and either outright denials or silence from the authorities over their existence. On a visit to Lomas de Poleo, to pay respects to Paula Gonzalez before leaving Juarez, there is news. It comes from 'EP' (whose name must be protected), one of the vigilantes patrolling the area in absence of police interest. EP had found three bodies in the hinterland behind the town 13 days ago. Strange, because the official number of bodies recovered for the month is zero. EP puts on a cap reading ' Jesus Cristo Te Ama ' - Jesus Loves You - and heads out to demonstrate the location of his latest, grievous find.

We pass through a gate reading 'Private Property', on to land known to have connections with the drug trafficking endemic to Juarez. Back here, there are airstrips for light planes for cocaine heading north and roads used by no one except the dreaded narco-trafficantes . In this desert expanse, EP's tireless groups keep watch for circling buzzards above a possible cadaver. He guides us to a bush to which plastic police ribbon has been attached and demonstrates how he works, and worked that morning, pawing the fine sand: 'Suddenly there was a hand, then a severed arm.' The bodies were arrayed on their backs in a row, each in the shape of a cross, naked and recently killed, with two maquiladora uniforms strewn nearby. 'Their arms were chopped and stomachs ripped out,' says EP. 'You get used to finding them,' he adds. 'I've done this so many times.' EP radioed the police and fellow vigilantes, some 13 witnesses, and the authorities duly arrived to take the bodies into official custody. 'If we hadn't found them,' insists EP, 'nothing would have been done.' As we leave, a motorcycle rider with a Balaclava mask, is waiting at the gate to ensure our departure.

Marisela Ortiz, who founded the campaigning group Nuestras Hijas Regreso a Casa - Our Daughters Coming Home - had asked the authorities about rumours of bodies found during January. 'They denied it, outright,' she reports. Marisela Ortega, a journalist from El Norte De Monterrey was told the same, also Diana Washington Valdez from the El Paso Times, across the US border. 'We will provide any pertinent information to the public... except for whatever is considered confidential,' Valdez was told. To The Observer, despite instant co-operation from the prosecutor's office on other questions, not a word on this latest discovery. Only one thing emerges as certain from this rueful development: that the authorities of Ciudad Juarez are, for whatever reason, hiding the bodies of murdered women. And so another word in the Spanish tongue is oft spoken in Ciudad Juarez today: ' El Encubrimiento ' - the cover-up.

Juarez is a city of transit. A pivot of Spanish colonisation, it was originally named El Paso Del Norte - the Northern Pass - first a military, then road, railway and trading junction. It was re-named after Benito Juarez, the popular leader who made the city his capital when exiled from central Mexico. Until recently, it was best known as cradle of the Mexican revolution: the first city seized in 1910 by militias under Pancho Villa. Juarez boomed during prohibition in the USA, a stroll across the river for drink and any accompanying vice; the margarita cocktail was invented in Juarez.

Juarez now lies, so they say, 'Entre algo y la nada' - between something and nothing. It belongs in that remarkable new frontier entity one might call 'Amexica', a zone unto itself spanning 2,000 US-Mexican border miles in length, and some 50 miles either side in width. The frontier is both porous and harsh. It exists, but yet does not. It is a border across which 800,000 people, 1m barrels of oil and $51m worth of auto parts cross every day. Half a million trucks pass each year from Juarez to El Paso alone. Families live astride it, workers commute across it, it has its own music - norteno .

Some 600 people a day arrive in Juarez to burgeon the grinding poverty among those building homes into the sand with whatever materials are on hand. But downtown there is construction everywhere, spanking new malls, capacious discos, gated communities of mansions and expensive concessions of North American chains.

The saying goes, 'If Juarez is a city of God, it's only because even the Devil is scared to come here.' There is an endemic lawlessness. While El Paso, just across the border, is the third safest city in the USA, Juarez has one of the highest crime rates in the Americas. Wealth and crime are entwined, both have origins in drugs. Apart from the murdered women, each day brings another drug-related execution. The new malls and clubs are wells for drug money. Just as Mexican cartels have wrenched command from their Colombian counterparts, so Juarez has subjugated Tijuana and Miami as the main northbound corridor for drugs into the US. The city's drug baron, Armado Carillo Fuentes - 'Lord of the Skies' - was supposedly killed during a bungled plastic surgery operation, unleashing a ferocious war for la plaza , the turf. But those informed in Juarez say this was a decoy death, that Fuentes is alive and well behind his plastic face, having forged a pact with local government.

But it was the legitimate global economy which wrought fundamental change in Juarez, and provided raw material for the feminicidio: the arrival of the maquiladores factories. In the 1960s, the Mexican government offered North American companies an opportunity to establish 'bonded' factories in which goods could be manufactured or assembled, then imported without local tax or duty payable. A necklace of maquilas was accordingly built along the border with 380, the highest concentration, in Juarez. With government assistance, Antonio Bermudez, the biggest landowner in the city morphed his cotton fields into endless square miles of windowless, single-storey boxes packed with unseen workers. The city's population trebled to 1.2m (officially), or 1.6m according to local academics. There was no attempt to create infrastructure - no roads or housing. Taxation is voluntary for companies, and most pay none.

Most of the migrants flocking from all over Mexico to work in the maquilas were teenage girls. The employers preferred women - some 70 per cent of the workforce is young and female - for the supposed dexterity of their hands and the irresistible ability to pay them wages well below a dollar an hour. But while this may be near slave labour by US standards, by those of villages in the south and interior this is money indeed.

Maquiladora work is relentless, concentrated and hard on the eye: tiny adjustments to microchip boards. 'We cannot really talk because then you would slip behind,' says Cinthia Rodriguez, who works at the same maquila as Maria Sagrario Gonzalez. Production lines are slowed down when inspectors visit from US parent companies. 'But it's good work,' Cinthia concludes.

On Saturday night, Juarez explodes. At the Sphinx disco, hundreds of young people, mostly girls, dressed to kill rather than to be killed, dance the week away. Isabel Alejandra Montes likes to show how well she moves, reckoning to blow $15 tonight, of the weekly $40 she earns at Thomson Electronics. 'Welcome to Juarez!' she shouts, holding aloft a bottle of Bohemia beer, and adding (resenting the tedious question): 'Obviously I worry about that but not now.'

The arrival of so many young women workers plays hard with the machista foundations of Mexican society. Behind closed doors, the rate of even reported domestic violence is terrifying. At home, on the street, in the economy, women are intended to serve up or shut up. And they should certainly not have the gall to earn their own purse.

Esther Chavez Cano, who established Casa Amiga, the city's first and only centre dealing with sexual and domestic abuse, explains: 'Men found themselves no longer the breadwinner. Women exchanged subordination at home for subordination to the factory boss, but this offered a certain independence. They could buy clothes, leave their abusive boyfriends, go out alone. And, with middle-aged men unemployable in Juarez, this created frustration, a backlash against women exhibiting independence for the first time. Being financially independent and wearing a mini skirt, however, is not an invitation to one's death.'

'From the maquilas,' says Marisela Ortiz, 'comes the culture of dispensability that underwrites the murders. The maquilas see women who work much as they see our city, as something expendable. So what if a woman is murdered, 10, or 100? There are always plenty more.'

The wind cuts like a scalpel through darkness before dawn, whipping up sand on the main road through the colonia (shanty) of Anapra. Through the side streets move shadowy figures of young women, emerging from makeshift homes, to await the special buses which transport them en masse to work. It was down such a road that Maria Sagrario Gonzalez walked after saying her last goodbye.

Three women from Veracruz explain that they are not even going to work. They get up every morning and go to the maquilas in hope of doing so. Another, Rosa Lopez Contrera, explains how she never waits for the bus alone, preferring to stick with friends. These women have forgotten the names of most of their murdered workmates, but Maria Sagrario Gonzalez rings a bell. 'I remember her,' says Rosa, 'everybody knows her mother.'

Paula Gonzalez has a disarming way of talking about her daughter's murder; she moves a strange, distant smile across her face when reaching the most heartsick passages of her narrative. The Gonzalez family arrived from Durango in 1995. 'This area is famous,' she proclaims. 'People say, "Oh, that's where all the murdered girls come from!"' It is a place of hutches on borrowed land; there are spirited little abarrotes - basic stores - here and there. Paula has managed to open one of her own. After her daughter was killed, she says, she retreated from the neighbourhood she had made home. 'My first reaction was to close off, thinking only about Sagrario. Her father was in a terrible state; awful physical problems. But then some mothers from the neighbourhood asked me to be their representative and to act. And I did.'

From somewhere Paula drew insistent strength. The resultant Committee of Neighbours meets every Sunday. Rather than dwell on the murders, it seeks to find 'ways to protect the living'. It has forced the authorities to install a few electrical lines, some water pumps, and even a kindergarten.

'When I deal with the police about my daughter,' says Paula, 'I never know whether I am dealing with a criminal or a cop - probably both. But I feel they have the obligation to tell me what is going on. It's hard to go there every day and see how bored and hostile they are. We don't expect help from the authorities any more. All we can do is awaken the citizenry.' Along the main Ruta Anapra are painted black crosses on a pink background. 'Less to commemorate the dead,' says Paula, 'than to warn young women that they are in danger.

'I do everything for Sagrario,' she reflects. 'Sagrario was in the chorus at church and taught catechism class. She gave the children sweets, so I do. From Sagrario...' - who is staring out from the photograph overhead, with serious, dark eyes. Paula wrings her hands. 'But I would rather work. There is little point in asking for the big things, so we fight for the normal things in life'.

'Everything still astonishes me,' says Esther Chavez at the abuse crisis centre. 'Even though I have been fighting this for 10 years.' Chavez returned from Mexico City to her native Juarez to look after her sick mother, intending to leave. But her mother lived until the age of 102. Chavez established a dress shop, heard about the lives of women in the city and shifted gear to set up Casa Amiga. When the feminicidio began, she tried to push the authorities for answers. The official response was to advise women not to dress provocatively, avoid walking the streets and 'If you are sexually attacked, pretend to vomit. That will be repulsive to the attacker, and he will probably flee.'

The unofficial answers came in a more distinctive tone. For a girl to go out alone is 'like a little treat' said former prosecutor Arturo Gonzalez Rascon. 'Like putting a candy at the entrance to a school.' The former Deputy Attorney General, Jorge Lopez, remarked: 'When a young woman goes missing, more often than not, the parents will tell you that she was practically a saint! But then we start making inquiries and find out that she was out dancing every night.' The mother of one girl murdered last year was appalled to find her daughter's clothes tossed, some morning later, over the fence of the back yard. When a police officer came to collect them, he remarked: ' La chavana andaba da cabrona ' - 'That slut liked a good portion.' 'You must remember,' says Chavez, 'that this is a state in which wife beating was not a criminal offence until a year ago. Not unless the wounds were "visible for longer than 15 days". And even since then, we have failed to get one conviction, because the cases are always said to be too "complicated".'